I
will let you know in a day or two whether you are to be discharged or
retained at a larger salary. Somebody send Ames to me."
Ames was the king-pin, the snowy-petalled Marguerite, the star-bright
looloo of the rewrite men. He saw attempted murder in the pains of
green-apple colic, cyclones in the summer zephyr, lost children in
every top-spinning urchin, an uprising of the down-trodden masses in
every hurling of a derelict potato at a passing automobile. When not
rewriting, Ames sat on the porch of his Brooklyn villa playing
checkers with his ten-year-old son.
Ames and the "war editor" shut themselves in a room. There was a map
in there stuck full of little pins that represented armies and
divisions. Their fingers had been itching for days to move those
pins along the crooked line of the Yalu. They did so now; and in
words of fire Ames translated Calloway's brief message into a front
page masterpiece that set the world talking. He told of the secret
councils of the Japanese officers; gave Kuroki's flaming speeches in
full; counted the cavalry and infantry to a man and a horse;
described the quick and silent building, of the bridge at Suikauchen,
across which the Mikado's legions were hurled upon the surprised
Zassulitch, whose troops were widely scattered along the river.
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